I believe that I first heard this idea a few months ago from Michigan Virtual CEO Jamey Fitzpatrick. Then I saw it yesterday in the New York Times. I don’t know where it originated, but I love it as a framing for AI in education.
Is school a gym or a warehouse? A fitness center or construction site? A practice track or a factory?
In this analogy, school is the gym, the fitness center, the practice track. But too many students don’t see it that way—which is why AI presents such a challenge in education.
In a warehouse, forklifts are used for obvious reasons. They are fast, efficient, and lower the risk of injury. A worker who said “that’s ok, I’ll carry all this stuff myself” wouldn’t last very long.
But if someone used a forklift to move weights around in a gym and then said they had worked out, nobody would know quite what to think.
In the factory, the point of effort is to get something done, typically a task with economic value. Doing that thing more easily, efficiently, and cheaply is good, all other things being equal.
In a gym, in contrast, the point is to work harder, to push yourself, to get stronger or more flexible. Finding an easier way to get to the apparent endpoint (lifting weight) doesn’t actually produce the outcome you are seeking, because the goal isn’t to lift the weight, it’s to train your muscles.
As Helen Toner puts it in the NYT article:
“With A.I., the analogy is that we now all need to figure out where A.I. can help us do bigger, cooler things, like building personalized software, and where we need to build our own cognitive abilities first, like learning to write.”
Although most students would instantly understand the gym/warehouse analogy, I’m not sure they would all get, or agree with, where education fits.
Telling students they can’t use AI, when students are convinced it will help them, is a losing battle. Helping them see that school is more like a gym is probably a better approach. But to do that, we may need to ensure that school is, in fact, more like a gym than a factory.
If you’ll be in Sacramento for DLAC Ignite next week, I hope you’ll join the opening keynote panel discussing AI, one of the other AI-related sessions, our technology symposium in partnership with COSN, or any of other sessions focused on instructional strategies, special education, and the nuances of digital learning.
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